Customer Reviews

Hemingway

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have had the pleasure of reading several (actually, quite a few), biographies concerning Hemingway over the years. Some were good, others not so good and some were absolutely horrible. With each book tough, good or bad, I did learn something new about E. Hemingway and/or his writing. This is a good thing. This particular biography by Kenneth S. Lynn is yet another take on the man and the ledged who was Ernest Hemingway. No I am not a big fan of Hemingway's novels, but am a great fan of his short stories, but overall I find that the "man" Hemingway is actually more fascinating that the "writing" of Hemingway. That being said....

This work by Kenneth Lynn probably addresses Hemingway's actual work more than most of the biographies I have read. Most of his major and quite a number of minor works are covered here. The author discusses these works in conjunction with what the author knows, or has speculated, of Hemingway's life. It has been mentioned by a couple of reviewers that this is a revisionist view of Hemingway and his work. I personally do not look at it as such. Even a cursory review of Hemingway's work reveals a very troubled man behind the words and the story. There is really nothing "new" here, only a different way of looking at the facts we all pretty well can figure out for ourselves with a bit of attention. This work, like all works of this nature has pros and cons. First the pros:

The work is well done, well written and certainly holds readers attention. As far as I can tell, the author has done his research and done it well. The author has given us some great food for thought as we read Hemingway's work and I know, I for one, will read EH in a bit of a different light from now on. This is good. The author has presented his arguments and observations in a very forceful and convincing way. Each statement he makes, each speculation, is backed up with quite sound logic. The author has written an interesting biography, one well worth the read. The Background information, in particular that of the literati establishment in Paris during the twenties and thirties, is quite well done in this work. We get great glimpses of some very famous people. I think most readers will learn a lot from reading this work. I know I did. Now for the cons:

Like another reviewer here, I simply do not know the qualifications of Kenneth S. Lynn as to the validity of some of the speculations he makes about the influences Hemingway's family had over his work. I do not know what the qualifications are of the author as to how he can speculate what was actually going on in HM's mind as he was writing a certain piece. It would seem that everything that HM ever put on paper had some sexual deeper meaning to it, according to Lynn. I find this difficult to fully believe. Some times a story is just a story and nothing more. Next, I felt the author was one of those that jumped on the "lets bash Hemingway" band wagon that seems to pop up about every twenty years, as this certainly is not a book that admirers of HM will appreciate. (It is childish of me, I know, but I would love to be in a room with Lynn and Hemingway as Lynn reads this book to Hemingway). Everyone the poor man ever knew or spoke to, seems to have written a book about him or is trying to. (At least Lynn did not rant on for over 600 pages trying to prove that HM was a homosexual as Mellow did in his work "Hemingway, A Life Without Consequences." This author, Lynn, as far as I can tell, feels HM is only suffered from gender confusion, or something like that.

All in all this book is well worth the read. It gives us just one more slant of the life of a fascinating man. I do recommend though, that the reader check out, read and discover several other biographies on HM as this one being reviewed here is certainly not the beginning and end of all Hemingway biographies. I would also suggest you read the fine work by Noel Riley Fitch, "Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation." Some of the folks, writers, artists, publishers, etc. are not all that well know today to the general public, are pretty obscure now, and a bit of knowledge of these people will make reading Lynn's work much more pleasurable.

Overall, recommend this one highly. I am giving it five stars, not because I agree with or believe everything the author has written, but because he, Lynn, has written it well and it has given me something to think about...something I always appreciate.

Lovers of Hemingway as the macho, confident, larger than life hero may not like this book, but anyone who wants a vision of objective truth with the good and bad falling where the details say they should, will love this meticulously researched story of the real Hemingway. The author weaves the stuff of Hemingway's fiction into the record of his life, upsetting the hero worship attitudes of some earlier biographers by showing clearly how what Hemingway revealed himself to be was rarely truthful, and what was fiction often was his inner truth disquised. Although the book is over 700 pages, the author's easy narrative style holds the reader's attention and no where do we get lost or feel overwhelmed with detail. Stories of how Hemingway interacted with other great writers of his day ae fascinating, and where he did accomplish interesting adventures, Lynn gives him easy credit. For example, where would Joyce's Ullyses be today had Hemingway not subsidized it's publication and planned how to smuggle it into the country? The book is more than a biography, it is a slice of Hemingway's time and literary community. Most refreshing is how easy it is to tell the facts from the author's astute speculation and escape the myth written as biography we have read in so many other places.

Kenneth Lynn's biographical treatment of Ernest Hemingway is thorough and magnificent. It satisfied me for several reasons--not the least of which was the cheap z shop price I paid for it. What I liked about the narrative best is Lynn's habit of discussing Hemingway's work and life simultaneously. Just as with the man, the fiction blends in seamlessly with the non-fiction. The body of the text is almost 600 pages long and a solid half is devoted to those halcyon years of productivity; that wondrous decade of artistic bliss between 1920 and 1930. Due to the expansiveness of the biography and literary analysis I found those pages to be highly addictive reading. Indeed, I've just purchased Finca Vigia edition of his short stories and will devour them with a keen level of appreciation due to the efforts of Mr. Lynn. Personally, I did not find this biography to be revisionist. There was a great deal of atmospherics inherent to the masculinity of Ernest Hemingway. How much the macho corresponded with his true essence will always be subject to debate. This is not a controversial statement as Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald, and countless others noticed the disingenuous, "tries too hard" aspects of his personality. He was a caricature in many ways, but I continue to find his style beguiling and life mesmerizing.

As some others have said here, Lynn clearly hates Hemingway. You can read the entire book, as I did, and discover not one redeemable thing about Hemingway, amazing since he is still considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century, one who formed many lasting friendships over the years while he was changing the course of American literature.

Lynn is one of those critics who, as one writer put it, is like the partisans who come down out of the mountains after the battle and shoot the wounded. Lynn's analysis of the effect that Hemingway's mother had on her son by dressing him in girls' clothes in his youth is laughable, nickel psychology that would embarrass Lucy in Peanuts.

I heard Hemingway's son Patrick at the Oak Park centennial celebration of Hemingway's birth describe Lynn as, simply, "a liar." I'm inclinded to agree.

Read Michael Reynolds' bio instead.

Lynn's book is the third Hemingway biography I've read (others: A. E. Hotchner, Carlos Baker). I found KSL's book to be quite readable, and his arguments well rationalized and thought-provoking. His exploitation of the psychological perspective is unique among the Hemingway biographies I've read or heard of, and in the abstract, his thesis is plausible. That there could be a neurotic, unconsciously destructive mother (or father for that matter) who could cause severe and lasting psychological damage to her children, is hardly news. However, getting inside another man's head is risky business - all the more so when the associated analysis will run into hundreds of pages and involve articulating the life long effects of childhood damage, character flaws, etc and following them into and back from Hemingway's work. The possibilities for misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and unconscious personal bias etc., are infinite.

In the final event, I found I couldn't give full credence to this style of biography, at least not without having certain knowlege of its author's powers of mind, life experience, and his ability to judge another man's character - things that a reader typically can not know about an author. Notwithstanding, I'm glad to have read the volume, and it offers a counterbalance to Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway, sometimes criticized as too uncritical of the man. I still prefer Baker however, perhaps because his emphasis on literary analysis is of more interest to me and less 'risky'. And, Baker's companion work, "Hemingway, The Writer as Artist" dovetails nicely with his biography of Hemingway.

The author, professor of history at John Hopkins and formerly chairman of Harvard's graduate program in American Civilization, depicts Hemingway as a deeply troubled man whose "fight with his own inner demons produced some of the greatest American fiction of the twentieth century". This is a far more dynamic biography than the earlier serious work by Carlos Baker, and therefore more controversial. Lynn methodically shows how incidents (or imagined incidents) in Hemingway's life reappeared in the content of his books. Basically, Hemingway almost always wrote about himself, but rarely honestly. Lynn roots out the lies told about himself which other biographers, especially later hangers-on such as Hotchner, swallowed whole. As a man, Hemingway was a macho bully showing no loyalty to friends. Lynn argues that Hemingway's persona was shaped by his anxieties about his sexual identity. Although clinically paranoid by the end of his life, distrust and envy of others, particularly perceived literary rivals, was part of his make up from earliest days.

While distrusting some of the analytic conclusions about Hemingway's persona--Lynn is not a psychiatrist--there is a considerable body of research that supports many of Lynn's theories about the man. Book has extensive notes and bibliography.

I don't mind when someone hates Hemingway, as Mr. Lynn so obviously does, but I have to protest when someone drags Hemingway's works into his own cesspool of psycho-speculation. Lynn starts with fancy theories about Hemingway's supposedly twisted psyche, and then goes looking for proof in Hemingway's works. And with no apparent awareness of contradiction, Lynn interprets Hemingway's works based on a theory of Hemingway's inner turmoil while condemning others for basing their interpretations on hero-worship. Lynn and other Hem-haters seem unable to bear the disturbing reality of Hemingway's genius, the purity and invulnerability of his best prose. But now this "biographer" has managed in a thoroughly suave way to mix up Hemingway's supposed life with his previously unsullied works. In fact, at some points it's impossible to tell whether the pronoun "he" in one of Lynn's sentences refers to Hemingway or to a character in one of his books. Does no one else feel discomfort rather than titillation at being forced to peep into the rather shabby fantasy life of an audacious psychograper? This is the kind of production that has made a complete shambles of scholarship in the late 20th Century. I just hope that in the next 100 years people will stop trying to read Hemingway and will start to read his books.

I love the writings of Ernest Hemingway -- my first English term paper in college was on symbolism and contrast in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and I reread him in my undergraduate American Literature classes and here and there the years since. All that said to reflect that I am biased in favor of understanding his literary genius from a more favorable perspective than that offered by Kenneth S. Lynn.

Having written a few books myself, I can fully understand how spending years on a topic can result in the writer coming to despise the subject one writes about, but Lynn seems to have crossed some boundary with this effort. It's almost as though he wrote the biography and then went back and inserted a jab here and there on every page. Within the first 100 pages he crossed the line with a description of Hemingway's favorite sexual position. From that point on I first became tired of seeing such excellent, hard scholarly work marred by remarks here and there disparaging other biographers, then became very annoyed at the authors' remarks reflecting a deep dislike of the man, his work and his relationships with his mother, sister, father and everyone he met.

I typically read three or four books at a time and the quality of another title I was reading -- "The Autobiography of Mark Twain" -- was a constant reminder to me that one doesn't HAVE to read books that are dark, negative and downright depressing. After all, that's what recreational reading is all about. So, halfway through Lynn's book I gave up and devoted my time to Mark Twain instead.

There's good detail here, but it's like viewing a beautiful lawn sprinkled with weeds. I give the book an "A" for effort and scholarly detail; but, a "C-" for interjecting far too many negative narrator judgments regarding Hemingway's personal life. But, I place the blame more with the editor than the author. When writing about a topic for a long time it's easy to get lost in the details. The editor should have toned them down and let the book reflect the years of effort and research that Lynn put into it.

Bottom line ? Keep an open mind and remember the quality of Hemingway's work and his place in American Literature.

R. Neil Scott
Middle Tennessee State University

Having read several Hemingway biographies, I can verify that this book presents a very different view of Hemingway. I am inclined to believe that much of it is probably true and may be a more accurate presentation of Hemingway as he really was than most others. But in a biography the authors' credibility is most important, especially if the author obviously doesn't like his subject. One of several things that causes me concern in this area is the treatment of Hemingway's wartime relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky. I was astonished to find Lynn reporting that they had a full fledged sexual affair while Hemingway was incompacited, requiring special accomidations for the sexual activity. Agnes denied her entire life that she ever had intercourse with Hemingway and most biographers report this. Lynn provides intiminate details that he could not possibly know, and provides no reference notes or explanation as to where it came from. He simply states it as fact, and cites other instances with other women where Hemingway favored this particular activity. It appears that, based on these other instances, he has assumed that it happened in this instance too, and asserts it as fact. This streaching the story far beyond the reported facts without stating that it is specuation raises questions about the facts(?) in the rest of the book and the credibility of its author. It thus appears to be an interesting, but not necessary factual story.

I picked up this book with interest, as it was laid on a front table in celebration of Ernest Hemingway's 100th birthday. Big mistake. This book stomps on the corpse of one of America's premier writers. I am no big Hemingway fan, but I hoped this book would discuss the man's life and put it into the larger context of his place in the world of literature and the world at large. Instead, I got a load of psychobabble from a history professor with an obvious chip on his shoulder against Hemingway. This Hemingway bio, which ends on the very page after Ernest puts a shotgun to his head, with next to no explication or discussion of consequences, is seriously lacking.